Intellectual Property

The next speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Tessa Houghton, who begins by noting the 2009 New Zealand blackout of Websites and avatars, in protest against new copyright legislation. This is a form of spectacular viral publicity, and has been repeated in a number of national contexts over the past years – variously protesting copyright or Internet regulations. The anti-SOPA/PIPA blackout of early 2012 is another example for this.

Gothenburg.
It’s the last day of AoIR 2010, and the first session I’m attending starts with Jan Nolin, whose interest is in filesharing. He describes this as Internet-based cultural consumption (IBCC), in order to move away from terms like filesharing, peer-to-peer networks, and other more limited concepts. IBCC is a broad and inclusive term, then (though excluding user-led content creation) – it includes societal contexts, technological and economical choices, social relationships, and political and legislative contexts.

IBCC has been important in shaping the Net – it has been in a tug of war pattern between legislation and technology: increased legislation leads to advances in circumvention technology, etc. There was a tech push from filesharers at first, then a legal response, then further evasive technology like Napster, then counter-evasive practices from the industty, and more recently a differentiation between white, black, and grey practices. Most recently there has been a specialisation and commercialisation of grey markets – an emergence of a copygrey business model.

Gothenburg.
The final speaker in this AoIR 2010 session is Bjarki Valtysson, whose interest is in the politics of access to exchange-oriented processes of mass self-communication – which build on a different arrangement of production, distribution, and consumption processes than we used to have. This is a clash between the politics of access (read/write) and the politics of permission (read-only culture), and there’s a question about how this plays out in digital public spheres.

This can be examined in the context of a number of projects. The Europeana content archive has been hampered by complex polemics regarding online accessibility, the digitisation of collections, preservation, and the storage of content; the same is true for the BBC’s Digital Archives project, for example. Against this, the Wikimedia Commons contains some 7.5 million freely available files which are available under Creative Commons or public domain licences.

Bremen.
It’s too early, too chilly, and too foggy for words – but regardless, the second day of the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference to ECREA 2010 is about to begin. The keynote speaker this morning is Tristan Mattelart, whose focus is on audiovisual piracy - and he begins by noting the substantial attention already paid to this phenomenon, though mainly as a for of 'criminal' activity. He notes that there is a difference between Internet piracy and physical piracy (the sale of counterfeit DVDs and CDs), and that there are differences in such piracy between different countries.

We already know the legal economy of communication in southern and eastern countries pretty well – but that’s less true for the informal economy of communication, which is nonetheless an important aspect of these overall economies. This informal economy plays a central role in the circulation of media and cultural products, in fact – and what Tristan means by ‘southern and eastern countries’ are countries as far afield as Tunisia, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, and others.

Sadly, the existing literature on the subject of piracy in southern and eastern countries is voluminous, but very narrow in coverage. It is formed mainly of self-interested reports by copyright industries (MPAA, IFPI, BSA, IIPA), and contains alarmist analysis of the dangers which piracy poses to the movie, music, and software industries. What such reports contain are figures on the calculated ‘losses’ to the industry due to pirated content; many southern and eastern countries especially appear as zones of maximum instability for the industry.